Weird and Getting Weirder All the Time

When Ross Douthat launched his Interesting Times podcast with The New York Times, he said somewhere that he was going to be talking to lots of different kinds of people—many on the right, some on the left, and lots of others in the tech world who don’t clearly “code” as left or right—just to get a handle on a world that is increasingly strange, peculiar, and just plain weird.

I think Douthat did a good job of that on his podcast, and I hope he keeps it up with his new gig at 60 Minutes. But this isn’t a post about him. It’s a post about one facet of the weirdness Douthat rightly emphasized in his comment about the present.

What do I mean by weird? There are so many examples. The most obvious is the simple fact that Donald Trump is (still) president, acting like a moronic buffoon every single day, at home and around the world, contributing in countless concrete way to America’s hegemonic suicide.

But in this post, I’m more interested in a different aspect of weirdness. Here is one way to summarize it: The Silicon Valley (SV) tech companies developing artificial intelligence tell the world, quite openly, that AI will likely put tens of millions of American out of work in the coming years, and that there’s a 10 or 20 percent chance the technology will annihilate the human race (the SV types call this “x-risk,” as in “existential risk”), but more like a 50 percent chance it won’t do that and instead will end all scarcity and allow human beings to live forever. As far as these entrepreneurs and allied boosters are concerned, the broader public should be thrilled with that risk profile and cheer it on, excited by the prospect of living through the birth of the Machine God (or demon?) that will (maybe? probably?) launch humanity into a post- or transhuman future.

That’s weird! Really weird! Not at all the kind of thing being discussed when I was a teenager in the 1980s, or a young adult in the 1990s, or a freshly minted Ph.D. trying to build a stable career in the anxious years following the 9/11 attacks, when we “merely” feared “Islamofascist” terrorists using weapons of mass destruction to level a city or two. That was scary. But it wasn’t as weird as the present, awash as it is with redemptive-apocalyptic predictions and pronouncements.

But the weirdness goes so much farther and deeper than the things tech moguls are saying, far more to encourage further massive investment in their companies than to win PR points. Venture capitalists might welcome extremely high risk-profiles provided the upside potential is sufficiently enormous. (After all, if the world ends in a couple of years, who cares that you lost a ton of money in the run-up to the civilizational cataclysm?)

Consider the ongoing bipartisan backlash against data centers. I learned a lot about this from reading Nate Silver’s recent discussion with Jasmine Sun, a former Substack employee who knows the SV AI world very well and has spent time over the past few months traveling around Wisconsin and Michigan to report on grassroots opposition to AI and data-center construction. She sees it mainly originating from the left, since the pro-business faction of the GOP still has a lot of power in the party and generally supports economic dynamism, including encouraging AI and the building of the data centers it requires to keep growing.

I’m not at all sure how accurate that will prove to be.